1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method of searching and visualizing an instance path and, more particularly, to an apparatus and method of searching and visualizing an instance path, in which when two or more keywords and a path search condition are received, an instance path search and visualization apparatus generates a pair of instances with respect to the keywords, respectively, extracts a pair of classes corresponding to each of the pairs of instances, respectively, obtains an ontology schema path with respect to each of the pairs of classes, respectively, searches for an instance path corresponding to the path search condition using each of the ontology schema paths, respectively, outputs an instance path display screen on which the searched instance paths are displayed, and if the path search condition is changed, obtains and visualizes instance paths corresponding to the changed path search condition.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, people are able to intuitively determine the semantic relationship between words used. For example, it can be seen that while there is a close relationship between “football boots” and “football”, there is no special relationship between “football boots” and “vehicle”. Therefore, when people read a document, they may know this document is associated with which word and may recall a related word from the document even when the associated word is not included in the document.
Since a Semantic Web, a next generation web technology, in which a computer can understand the meaning of data on the web and perform logical reasoning, has attracted much attention, the amount of Web data represented in RDF/RDFS increases.
However, it is very difficult for even experts to directly search for a relationship between instances from a massive triple store. Moreover, in order to search for the relationship between instances in a systematic manner, the search is performed based on the direction of the relationship, and thus it is impossible to search for diverse and complex relationships, which is very problematic.